


Surface Tension

by Termagant (subduction)



Category: Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-01
Updated: 2007-08-01
Packaged: 2017-10-06 00:51:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subduction/pseuds/Termagant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>February. Cold midsummer in the fifties, but despite the frigidity of air and sea and man there are still watches to be watched and days to be passed, like any other ship on any other voyage, and on cool clear nights two lieutenants might stand alone in conversation on the quarterdeck and go undisturbed for hours.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surface Tension

In the eyes of slaves and sailors you have seen most of the violent emotions of the heart — anger, hatred, fear, jealousy, lust — and recognize them well enough by now. You like to think you know something of men's hearts; like to think you understand, by recognition of these signals, how to get the measure of a man and, when necessary, how to manipulate him.

The look in Lieutenant Bush's blue eyes as they follow the captain through his walk every morning is one you have never seen before, and try though you might you cannot put a name to it.

—

It was a long seven months rounding the Horn, and there was little to do. This is one way of putting it.

—

You have been at sea for fifteen weeks. The water is green and teeming, tobacco is growing scarce, and all the ship knows that Hankey the surgeon is dying below decks. The seas grow rougher each day, and the captain more taciturn. Already it is rare for him to speak three words together to any man; by the time the Pacific begins to lap at _Lydia_'s bows, he will be all but mute. But that is still to come.

February. Cold midsummer in the fifties, but despite the frigidity of air and sea and man there are still watches to be watched and days to be passed, like any other ship on any other voyage, and on cool clear nights two lieutenants might stand alone in conversation on the quarterdeck and go undisturbed for hours.

Not that anyone has much to say to one another, these days. It isn't a question of the captain's silence being contagious, but rather of having exhausted the conversational possibilities.

Two lieutenants, then, standing alone in silence.

—

You have been at sea for six weeks. Three bells ago the sea was calm and the wind steady, _Lydia_'s groaning beams as quiet as ever they were, and Mr Midshipman Hooker was just mustering the courage to pose a question to the lieutenant of the watch when Bush's head appeared from the companionway.

"Can't sleep," he explained, a touch apologetically. He stood there, hands behind his back, and surveyed the deck for a moment before deciding on the taffrail. As he disappeared astern you turned back to Hooker with an inquiring look.

The boy quailed visibly under scrutiny, but mustered the courage to ask his question. "Savage said — is it true ye've been to Africa, sir?"

"_Beware, beware the Bight of Benin, for few come out, though many go in._"

"Sir?"

"Aye, I've been. Is it a story you want, then, Mr Hooker?" You put a bit of a threatening drawl into your voice — teasing the midshipmen is good fun, even if you'll never be able to terrify them into obedience the way Bush does — but in truth you are a born storyteller and have the stories to tell, and the burdens of duty are easy tonight. No reason not to, and so you began to spin a yarn of Africa for Hooker.

Neither of you noticed Bush until he was upon you, leaning on the quarterdeck rail on the other side of Hooker. The midshipman's rapt face was turned toward you, so that it wasn't until your eyes flickered over that Hooker noticed Bush there beside him. He snapped upright, bracing himself, but Bush just regarded him for a moment — you thought you could detect the twitching of that rare wry smile at the corner of his lips — and then four bells sounded and Hooker scampered off to the binnacle, saved by his duty.

Bush remained; shifted over a little, until his elbow was nearly touching yours on the rail, and waited for you to continue.

Three bells later you are still there, still talking softly. Bush sailed as far as the Nile in the old _Superb_, and so he knows something of muddy African rivers; of delirium, of dark-skinned women, of the way the desert creeps inside a man to burn him from the inside out. And you know, though he has not told you, that he and Hornblower were in _Renown_ together — that business with Captain Sawyer — you never heard the full story, but you know you won't have it from Bush — and so he understands, too, when you relate an incident from your privateering days in the Caribbean. He draws your stories out with some curiosity, adding his own reminiscences where appropriate. Daring maneuvers executed in Channel gales; the wild, outnumbered boarding of a Spanish first-rate off Tripoli; Hornblower's attack at Samaná Bay.

He asks you, eventually, about slaving. You have learned to be careful here; people, you have learned, tend not to understand. You look away from him, out over the shrouded shapes of the deck, indistinct in moonlight.

You shrug, but your tone is guarded. "Not so different from the press-gang."

He considers this momentarily, and nods. "No, I don't suppose so."

He is solemn, but then he laughs, and begins to tell you of his last days on the press: of men so desperate to escape the King's noble service they had burrowed into heaps of stinking refuse, chained themselves to walls, dressed up in their wives' skirts. Bush, of course, had found them all; had pressed them all.

Bush, you think, understands. He admires the captain, but he is like you: and you are not the sort of men who have the luxury of ideals.

—

The wardroom has become familiar rapidly and necessarily. You know the names of Hankey's three sons, that fish stew makes Galbraith break out in hives, that Rayner can work any problem in spherical trigonometry quicker than you could get it down on your slate but can hardly spell his own name. You know that Bush has served with the captain before; and you know, too, that Bush will shut up tight whenever the talk seems as though it might take a turn in that direction. You all learned early on to avoid the subject of the captain, and to talk a little too eagerly of anything else, at least when the first lieutenant was by.

Otherwise you pass your nights as aboard any ship. You play at dominoes and at cards. You drink too much, and sometimes you sing. Simmons has an even tenor, Galbraith a warbly one, and Bush, once he has wet his throat sufficiently, will rumble a tune in a fine deep baritone.

On more than one occasion Bush has told stories of Trafalgar. What his words lack in grace they make up for in power, and you, who went to sea not for glory but for gold, are swayed a little in spite of yourself.

You know quite well what you are doing here in _Lydia_, here in the traitorous waters of the south Atlantic. You'd been more than content with the prospect of a long voyage. It isn't running; not really. You'll always go back eventually. It's more a question of — breathing room.

You know — or can guess well enough to fill in the gaps, which for you has always been the trick — most of the others' stories, too, and what has brought them where they are. For Hankey it is dissolution and the opportunity of indulging his incompetence. For Hooker, imagined glory; for Galbraith, adventure; for Rayner, simple love of duty and orders. You've caught the way Mr Midshipman Savage watches the hands setting sail, and can hazard a guess at what brought him to sea. _If that lad doesn't learn subtlety he'll swing for it one of these days_, you think — not uncharitably, but without much feeling on the subject either way. After slaves, everything is relative and very little comes as a surprise.

—

One day last week you came off watch in the forenoon and found Bush alone in the wardroom, head bent over the desk where he was scratching out a letter. The sunlight was falling aslant through the windows, turning the cheap paper to cream and picking out threads of silver in Bush's hair. He might be five years older than you, or fifteen: hard to tell. There are deep lines around those eyes, but under its broadcloth his large frame is solid and lean as a twenty-year-old's. When he stands behind the captain as he reads the Articles of a Sunday, the impression one takes away is of a fortress.

Bush's script is cramped and laborious, and he takes his time over each word, as though struggling to choose them — which, probably, he is. It was that look of concentration, the way he murmured under his breath, the way he bit his lip as he paused — all unconscious, all curious habits in a man ordinarily so rigid — which caused you to stop and watch him for far longer than you'd meant to.

You had been standing there perhaps a minute when he realized, half-turned in his chair to look at you.

"I'm sorry, sir, I did not mean to disturb you," you said quickly.

He nodded. You were still looking. "Writing the family, sir?"

"My sisters," he said, with a vague gesture at the writing-desk.

"Yes, of course," you replied, just a beat too late. You'd had that brief conversation already, early in the cruise before the simple topics had been exhausted: Bush's mother and four sisters to your three and a brother.

Bush never asked if you were married, so you hadn't had to lie. You liked him for that.

(More accurately, you suspected that it wouldn't have occurred to Bush to ask that question at all; that he was the sort of man for whom women are a vice to be indulged enthusiastically while in port and not missed while at sea. You liked Bush for that, too — and envied him, perhaps, a very little.)

Bush was still giving you that peculiar look. You had been staring, distracted, somewhere in the vicinity of the gun-ports.

"Was there something you needed, Mr Gerard?"

You gathered your greatcoat by way of excuse and went back on deck. At the same time this Monday he will be hunched over the desk again, and the following Monday the same. The fact that there is no hope of mailing these letters for weeks — months — does not seem to affect his routine. But then, he has never struck you as the sort of man to shirk his duty.

—

You have long made your living on understanding men. But — a lieutenant of the _Temeraire_, rounding the Horn in an undersupplied thirty-six with a mute captain and an unknown mission.

You cannot, for the life of you, figure it out.

Looking back, this is part of how it happens.

—

You have been at sea for eleven weeks. The sun shines, mostly; the midshipmen skylark with the boys, some fine mornings, and in the afternoons Crystal drills them in navigation. You half-listen to the lesson taking place on the deck below you. Arc-seconds, cosines, inverses. It does not do to let things rust, and you feel some faint satisfaction when Crystal gives the same answer you have reached above.

Though you have not sighted another sail in weeks, Rayner is training Clay and Savage as signal-midshipmen, and they study their books night and day. Hooker knows the flags by heart already, and sometimes you hear him testing the others. The midshipmen's berth, like the wardroom, has been forced into intimacy by the nature of the voyage; they are good lads, all of them, the older helping the younger. You had a brother, but you were not a midshipman until you were grown, and he never helped you with much.

As you are walking the deck one morning their clear boyish laughter percolates down from the maintopsail rigging, and your thoughts are pulled to Southampton as surely as if ten men were heaving upon a line connecting it with your heart. Knyvett is twelve or thirteen, but looks more like ten, and he has startlingly blue eyes under dark hair, and suddenly you have to go back to your cabin and sit on your cot, clenching your hands in your hair until the tightness in your throat passes. You start a letter, but tear it up.

That is dawn, or shortly after. You have the second dogwatch, and after dusk you go back on deck again. The midshipmen have come down from their perches, and they are clustered aft, and Bush the martinet, Bush the terror of boys and grown men alike, is teaching them the southern stars.

"The Southern Triangle," he says, pointing to three faint stars not far above the horizon. He bends as he points, coming down from his height a little so that small Knyvett can look along his straight arm and follow the pointing finger.

"And the Wolf," pointing lower now; "and there, I've heard that called the Teapot — and there are the Seven Sisters, you know them — and there — always watch for that, the false Cross. Navigate to that and you'll find yourselves wrecked on the Horn, sure as I'm a sailor."

He straightens a little as he sees you coming up, puts a bit of command back into his voice. "How might one tell the proper Cross from the false, Mr Clay?"

"There's an extra star, sir? Just — there," he adds, a little more confidently, pointing. Bush comes about and leans down to look, just as Knyvett was doing a moment ago, and nods.

"Indeed there is," he agrees. Makes sure the others see it as well, pushing and pulling them into place and pointing with that straight sure arm.

They all know the Cross, of course; it is bred into them now, to look for south the moment there is clear night sky above their heads, as ordinarily they would look for north. Many things, you think, have been turned upside-down on this voyage.

Bush never asked, but neither did you. You do not think he is, but he could be; he is gentler, less terrible in the moonlight, and these boys could be his, had he chosen a different life. Had he had the option of choosing.

He sees you approaching; smiles at you over the crown of Knyvett's hat, and the tightness is back in your throat again. You smile, though, and say "good evening, Mr Bush," and "a fine night," and with your finger trace the figure of the great Serpent in the stars for the boys, thankful for a reason to look away.

—

Galbraith is on deck with Crystal, and you, the remaining lieutenants, are just finishing your dinner when Clay comes knocking at the wardroom door the following night. He hops a little, nervous, as he relays the captain's compliments and would lieutenants Gerard and Rayner care to join him and Clay in a hand of whist.

The captain has not, to your knowledge, spoken a word to Bush in over a week.

You are careful not to look at him as you leave.

—

Some days later there is a commotion. You come on deck to the sound of raised voices for'ard, but before you can take two steps to see what is afoot Bush's roar cuts through the noise of man and sea alike. There is a knot of men near the foremast; he is upon them; they are broken, scattered. He collars one: dirty blond curls, newly pressed when the _Lydia_ had set out. Bit of a troublemaker, prone to drunkenness and flogged for it at least once that you can recall. Edwards, Edmonds. Something like that.

One broad hand grips tight about the back of his neck, forcing his head up to face Bush's rage. You try to make out what he is shouting, but cannot discern the words, only the tone.

Later, you gather the facts. Bits and rumours, but you know how to fill in the gaps to build a story. The man Bush had nearly throttled had been voicing his opinion of the captain. Other men, men who had served with the captain before, had taken exception. There had been a scuffle; there are more and more, these days, as the weeks stretch into unrelieved months and the men grow restless. It is simply Edmonds' bad luck; bad luck and stupidity. To criticize an officer to loyal men is stupidity. To criticize the captain where his first lieutenant can hear it is near suicidal.

You have heard the stories; you know, abstractly, what great deeds the captain has done, how he has earned the admiration and loyalty of his men. If anyone asked, you would be honoured to serve under him. But you do not yet love your captain as his men do. To you he is a pen-and-ink hero, an impressive statue on _Lydia_'s quarterdeck. When he walks in the morning you neither watch him nor conspicuously avert your eyes. He is simply there. He is there, and he is the captain, and that is all.

You are the officer of the watch, and so you go with Bush when he makes his report. It is the first time you have seen the two converse beyond _Steady as she goes, Mr Bush_ and _Aye aye, sir_.

On deck Bush had been trembling with fury, and you had been unfortunate enough to catch the look in his eyes as he marched Edmonds below. Bush, you remember thinking, would hang the man if he could.

Now he is rigid, at attention, but you suspect the same fury boils inside. The captain knows it; the captain ignores it. He cannot, however, fail to have the man flogged, and on Sunday afternoon Harrison lashes him to the grating and gives him two dozen of the cat.

The captain pretends to watch the flogging, but does not. His head is high, his shoulders rigid, his expression stern, but his gaze is fixed in the middle distance. He is a good liar, but you are better.

Bush watches every stroke.

—

Two lieutenants, leaning on the taffrail, watching the wake churn phosphorescent below. The Southern Cross hangs in a clear sky above, and in the moonlight Bush's features are softened: the hardness of his jaw tempered a little, his steely gaze muted. Still those eyes give nothing away. You wonder what it would take to make them bare an emotion, reveal his soul. Insubordination, laziness, slovenliness — yes, certainly; that much you have seen already. Battle, perhaps. He seems that type.

Whose arm brushes whose on the rail, who looks at the other first, who opens his mouth and closes it again — irrelevant. The thing is swiftly done, swiftly understood. No one wastes words, these days.

It could hardly be called an arrangement.

—

It is the twentieth of February, 1808. Your son is ten years old today.

—

Bush brings you off with the same expert manner he uses on the quarterdeck, rough and efficient, like he's been handling other men's cocks as long as he's been handling ships. And perhaps he has, but you don't think so; think this is, if not quite, then very nearly the first time. And yet his grip is fearless and hot and hard, and his gaze harder still. He doesn't do anything by halves, this Lieutenant Bush.

He blasphemes, torrentially, when he comes.

"Clean yourself up," is all he says, afterward. "You've the next watch."

—

You have been at sea for five months, and today, as he will do periodically, the captain is letting Bush exercise the hands at the guns. The frivolity of consuming shot and powder when _Lydia_ is unlikely to meet another ship for weeks can be excused by the potential benefit of a well-trained crew should such an encounter occur, and though it is Bush's idea you are the one to suggest it to the captain.

You race, Bush and Galbraith's larboard guns against yours and Rayner's to starboard, and again and again you order the guns reloaded, run out, aimed at the barrels cast overside for the purpose; again and again you and Rayner and Galbraith and Bush shout _Fire!_, until your throats are hoarse and the barrels are matchwood and the smoke and sweat of the gundeck is almost a living, liquid mass. It is foul; it is glorious. Nothing but battle, nothing but gunnery has ever made your blood rush so, and if you were a sentimental sort of man that might unsettle you, but you are not and it does not. Rayner comes up behind you in the gloom and claps you hard on the shoulders, shaking you a little; your gun-crews have done well, gained more than a minute on your starting time — and, most essentially, you have beaten Bush.

Galbraith shakes your hand with a laugh, mopping his brow with a filthy handkerchief, and follows Rayner up the companionway. The men are securing their guns and trooping up on deck, starboard chucking larboard on the shoulders and laughing. The fastest crews will have a double ration of spirit tonight, and you will have to watch them later, perhaps break up another fight. Better you should be the one to intervene than Bush. Better for the men, at any rate.

Bush is one of the last to leave the gundeck, and you realize it looks as though you have been waiting for him. Perhaps you have. He shakes your hand, his callused palm rough against yours; grins down at you and congratulates you sincerely. Your heart is still pounding, sweat is running down your temples and his, and you grip his hand just long enough to see acknowledgement in his eyes; that is all. He is at your back as you step up into the sunlight.

The smell of powder clings. You can still detect it on him, in his shirt and his hair, hours later; you know, too, that you must smell the same. You don't mind at all.

Bush isn't the most eloquent of men, nor the most talkative, though he is downright garrulous compared to the captain. He tends to choose his words slowly and a little cautiously, so it comes as a surprise when he slips up.

You have him backed against the wall, with one of your hands up his shirt and the other in his trousers. Bush's hands are in your hair, a little too tight, and his eyes are closed, and when you take him into your mouth he gasps and calls you _sir_.

It might be easy enough to explain away — and perhaps you have misheard. Certainly you pretend not to hear at all: go on sucking rhythmically, hollow-cheeked, and palming Bush's flat stomach until your mouth fills with salt and he goes limp against the bulkhead.

Bush never says it again, and you never bring it up.

—

The notion that a person's eyes can change colour with emotion strikes you, in your rational heart, as sentimental foolishness. But in Bush's eyes you have seen stormy greys and dangerous pales and the occasional light of laughter, and when he watches the captain walk the quarterdeck his eyes seem to you bluer than the morning sky above; bluer, even, than your wife's.

—

You have been at sea for a year and a day. In Southampton your son is growing to manhood, and you are nine thousand miles away, reaching south to round the Horn once more.

The captain has begun to speak to Bush again, and one night he is at the taffrail and Bush is there beside him, looking along the captain's pointing arm. If you were close enough to hear it, the captain would be indicating the stars of Argo Navis, Jason's great ship, and telling Bush the tales to go with it. Jason and Hera, dragon's teeth and the Golden Fleece, Circe the sea-witch and the Siren isles.

The captain leaves out certain details. Jason betraying his wife, whom he has sworn to love and honour; Jason condemned by the gods; Jason crushed beneath the hull of his own ship, whose keel in stars Hornblower is tracing for Bush. If you were close enough to see it, Bush's face would be unguarded and his eyes open, and he would not remember a word of the story tomorrow.

—

Jason, you remember, dies alone.


End file.
